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FACULTY SENATE MEETING
March 22, 2011

1. Call to Order Chair Overton called the eleventh meeting of the fifty-seventh session of the NC State Faculty Senate to order at 3 p.m.

2. Welcome and Announcement
Chair Overton announced that the Faculty Senate will provide fees for some of the registrations for faculty to attend mediation training. Faculty who are interested in attending the training will need to fill out the registration and send it to Marc Okner, Director of SAAO.

Chair Overton thanked those who worked hard to get nominations for the elections. The colleges that do not have nominations cannot participate in the electronic elections process. They will instead have to pursue the elections in their colleges.

Chair Overton announced that a number of faculty attended meetings during spring break to help develop a response to the draft Strategic Plan. She plans to complete a faculty response by March 25th.

Chair Overton stated that the time line for individual feedback is the same; the comment period closes on March 25th. The Writing Team will meet next Monday to begin integrating the comments and moving the document from a draft to a final copy to submit it to the April 22, 2011 Board of Trustees meeting.

3. Approval of the Minutes, Meeting No. 10, February 22, 2011
Secretary Helmut asked for approval of the minutes. The minutes were approved as submitted.

Houghtelling stated that Dr. Lomax convened a revision committee last fall to look at the university policy. The committee was comprised of mostly faculty from the colleges that received the most inventions on campus.

The six objectives of that review committee were:

Faculty was asking for clarification of the patent policy on consulting agreements;

They wanted to make sure our policy was consistent with BOG patent and Copyright Policies;

5. Federal Update-2011-2012
Matt Peterson, Director of Federal Research Affairs, stated that politics will continue to constrain public policy.

Peterson reported that sustaining previous growth rates for research and financial aid are going to be tough in this environment. There is still not an appropriations end game for the current fiscal year. He stated that by now he would have submitted legislative priorities to members of our North Carolina delegation and the deadline would be at us or past us. Peterson noted that the Preparations Committee has not even started dealing with the next budget year.

NC State lost about 13.5M in earmark funding. Many of those projects were solely at our campus, several were multi-campus partnerships. It’s possible that a small amount of that money will end up as competitive money but the vast majority of that 13.5M will not be coming to our campus in the fall.

Peterson reported that the other big challenge for us is financial aid. The House proposed $5 billion dollars in cuts from Pell grants and if you look at the changes that Congress made in Pell three years ago, they grew the program at a very fast rate by doing a number of things that added people and added dollars to each person’s grant and now it’s become harder and harder to sustain that rate of increase over the next few years.

6. Second Reading- Resolution Supporting a Resolution of the UNC Faculty Assembly on Academic Freedom
A motion passed to approve the resolution.

7. Elections – Secretary of the Faculty
The nominations for Secretary of the Faculty were Senators Mike Levy and Roby Sawyers. The Senators voted and the election ended in a tie, eleven all.

A motion passed to seek the votes of those senators with an excused absence from today’s meeting.

8. Issues of Concern Senator Havner brought a concern about changes in premium for group term insurance for retirees.

Chair Overton assignment the issue of concern to the Personnel Policy Committee.